


Character Assassination

by meguri_aite



Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: Case Fic, Gen, M/M, and trevor having a really good day, contains references to magical powers of narrative inevitability and weaponized aesthetics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 09:34:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17020209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meguri_aite/pseuds/meguri_aite
Summary: “You suck at this vampire business, bloodsucker.” Trevor pointed a half-finished chicken drumstick at Alucard. “Big fucking time.”





	Character Assassination

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bakcheia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/gifts).



* * *

The night was sleepy and moonless, which would have been awfully convenient if Trevor needed to run from anyone. It was less convenient for chasing after people, especially those who only appeared to use the ground to move about as a personal favour to their pursuers.

As if overhearing Trevor’s thoughts, his target chose this moment to throw himself upwards in an inhuman jump. Grabbing the filigree iron rails on the second floor balcony, the vampire pushed himself off the stone wall with a good kick and somersaulted mid-air. In the blink of an eye, he landed soundlessly inside the balcony box. 

“Show-off,” muttered Trevor, stationing himself behind an abandoned wheel cart to better see his target's next move.

The vampire didn’t seem to be in a rush. For a minute, he stood still as a statue, shrouded in darkness and an oversized long coat, which fluttered in the wind in the most melodramatic and flattering way possible. 

Trevor wondered if that was another supernatural skill, or the product of careful villainous nurturing and some ritual sacrifice. Perhaps washing it in blood of the innocent turned an ordinary coat into a dark fashion statement.

Seemingly having reached a decision, the vampire broke the stillness. Trevor saw him reach into the folds of his coat, and there was a flash of something — a knife? The vampire made a broad, swift sweep with one arm, then launched himself off the balcony in one smooth jump that took him across the street. A few light steps across a slanted terracotta rooftop he’d landed on, and he jumped again, disappearing from sight in the inner yard of the building.

There was no sound of feet landing on the ground, but by the time Trevor reached a side-street that gave him a good look on the entrance to the inner yard, there was also no longer any need for subterfuge. Only a deaf person wouldn’t have heard the noise of a door being broken down, wooden planks creaking plaintively, and glass shattering against stone floors. 

An unmistakable smell wafted from the building not long after, churning Trevor’s insides with a sense of irreparable loss.

“What a goddamn waste.” He shook his head, regretful.

There was nothing more to see here. With one last disappointed sigh, Trevor turned his back on the scene and retraced his steps.

 

* * *

“You suck at this vampire business, bloodsucker.” Trevor pointed a half-finished chicken drumstick at Alucard. “Big fucking time.”

Alucard gave him a frosty look across the table — a big thing of heavy oak that could accommodate fifty people, but only served the three of them for the moment. Sypha cut herself a thick slice of cheese and shamelessly put it on top the meat pie she’d brought from the inn she was staying in. Sypha was an excellent human being with a solid grasp of basic human needs, and Trevor was not too unhappy that he had dug her out of the Gresit catacombs. Not that he’d ever tell her that, of course.

“Do you have any constructive criticism to offer, or are you just crying because I destroyed the town’s wine cellars?”

A sorrowful pang resonated to the depths of Trevor’s soul at these cold, unfeeling words.

“That was good wine,” he said mournfully. The local red alone would have justified their presence in this town, if not in this mansion with its heavy tabletops on monstrous carved legs, skull-shaped candelabras and bronze mirrors as long as the dining hall. Trevor caught Alucard’s pouting face in the reflection and blew him an exaggerated kiss. Alucard frowned and jabbed at whatever piece of food was on his plate.

“If Trevor is upset about the wine, then likely all the other drunkards in town will be too,” Sypha shrugged philosophically. “Maybe that will finally rouse them.”

“I did leave threats! I left bloody handprints on the windows of several important families!”

Which might have been passably menacing — had it been directed towards people who didn’t fucking  _ worship _ vampires.

“I saw you do that,” Trevor dismissed him. “You should be grateful the night was dark. If they had noticed their lord and  _ protector _ hovering by their window in the middle of the night, they would probably have begged your pardon for not being ready to receive you with all the honors that you deserve, that very minute. Just you wait, come morning they’ll come up with a way to interpret your bloody handprints as a blessing or some such bullshit.” 

“I did not —  I am certainly  _ not _ their lord and protector. God knows what possessed this city’s vampire to style himself as one.” Alucard looked at their oppressively opulent and gothic surroundings with great distaste, but they refused to divulge any motivations of the manor’s rightful, if absentee, owner.

“Maybe he just wanted to be loooooved,” Sypha singsonged. She had moved on to dessert, and seemed to enjoy the cinnamon pastries about as much as Alucard’s huffy misery. “You found yourself some prophesied friends, best ones in the land, whereas he had to settle for a medium-sized town.”

“And his vampire instincts led him to the stupidest town in all of Wallachia, full of idiots who didn’t know any better than to erect a fucking mansion in honor of their vampire overlord.”

Sypha threw another cinnamon pastry at Trevor. He wasn’t sure if it she meant to share or shut him up: her face was already far-away and thoughtful. “Alucard, are we sure your predecessor was truly a vampire? I’m wondering, with everything here screaming gothic aesthetics...”

“He is not my predecessor!” Alucard started to protest, but cut off as he caught her expression. He pushed his plate away, stood up and started recounting what they knew about the town as he paced along the large bronze mirror. “The townsfolk firmly believe that the lord of this mansion was a vampire. Their legends, while generous with praise for their patron, don’t specify when he came about. They do, however, agree that he is prone to disappearing for years at a time, and then coming back again, young as ever. If that’s a con by some enterprising humans, it’s a pretty long-running one.”

“Maybe the predecessor was secretly grooming the successor, passing on the requisite knowledge. Like Gilgamesh,” Sypha said. Trevor had never heard of that Gilgamesh guy, but Alucard just nodded absently. Clearly no mob with pitchforks had driven  _ him _ out of his family library.

“Unlikely, but not impossible,” Alucard murmured, carding a hand through his hair. The locks spilled in waves of liquid gold across his shoulders, framing his face in a halo.

“See, it’s because you do shit like that that no one in this town is afraid of you,” Trevor pointed out.

Alucard stopped and gave him a blank look.

Sypha gave him a look that heavily suggested it was Trevor’s problem alone. 

“I mean, you have seen him, right?” Trevor gestured defensively at Alucard, trying to encompass his hair-fluttering, wall-slinking ways in a way that would disabuse Sypha of whatever notion she was entertaining. He didn’t like the way she was looking at him one bit.

Before he could think of a further argument that would have convinced her that Alucard was indeed too pretty to fear without having Trevor utter the words, Alucard resumed his pacing.

“Immediately upon our arrival, they singled me out of the crowd and hailed me as their vampire protector, whose return they had all eagerly awaited. The question is, did they jump to this conclusion because I bear a superficial resemblance to him, or more concerningly, because they could immediately detect my vampiric nature?”

“Can vampiric nature be  _ detected _ ? By regular humans?” Sypha said with curiosity.

“Can’t we just look around the house for that asshole’s portrait?” Trevor said, even though he had a feeling his sensible suggestion would be largely ignored in favour of more academic pursuits. “I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen one yet. Perhaps the devout worshippers pilfered them all to create altars at their own houses.”

Alucard rubbed his brow, frustrated, turned and perched on the tabletop, stretching his long legs against the back of the chair. The chair looked like it had been designed exclusively to be used in this manner. Trevor arched his eyebrows at Sypha to say, witness this, but she wasn’t looking at him.

“I actually have no idea,” Alucard was saying. “The only vampire I have interacted with was Dracula, and he —

“ — invented vampirism?”

“Has a presence, I was going to say. But he might have invented vampirism as well. He has sired some vampires in the past, for sure, even though I don’t know any details. It wasn’t a subject we talked about a lot.” His lips curled sardonically. “I used to think we had all the time in the world to discuss anything.” A shadow fell on his brow, casting his face in sorrow and sharp angles.

Trevor restlessly shifted in his chair.

“Look, does it matter at this point if the old man was a vampire or not? It doesn’t change the fact that you are doing a shit job of making the town denounce their vampire cult. And they have to get their heads out of their asses and do something that might save them from Dracula’s army if they hope to survive. We simply must raise the stakes.”

Alucard pretended not to have heard him. Sypha snorted and raised her palms. “Do you have any real suggestions? Because I haven’t learnt anything useful from the townsfolk yet.”

Trevor gave her a thoughtful look. “How are you finding your life as a wealthy merchant’s widow? Warmed the locals up to you yet?”

Sypha shrugged. “As much as I hate the dress, people are less watchful about what they say when they don’t think they are talking to a Speaker. But as I said, I haven’t learnt much besides the latest gossip on all the marriageable merchants and other opportunists.”

“Do you think,” Trevor said, dropping his voice in grave solemnity, “they would care if you met a terrible end at the hands of a true monster?” 

 

* * *

Stalking Alucard that night was a much more comfortable affair. 

Trevor had chosen the table in the darkest corner of Sypha’s inn because it gave him a good view of everything in the room, but what was even better was the house cider that generously flowed from the inn’s cellars. And the fish pie, god almighty.

Trevor signalled the tavern maid, a shapely blonde woman who was balancing five mugs and four plates on her arms, and asked her for a second slice. He could stalk Alucard like that all night, no problem. 

Sypha was five tables away from him, engaged in a friendly game of cards with three other people, all old-time patrons of the place and veteran swindlers, judging by the way they pretended not to know each other as they cheated Sypha out of her coins. She looked rather put out, but whether because of her loss at cards or her imminent assassination, Trevor wasn’t sure.

She had objected to being a helpless victim. Loudly. But in the end, she was pragmatic enough to admit that they had less chance of rousing public sympathy by having  _ Trevor _ die tragically before his time.

Trevor watched her rub her neck nervously and glance towards the entrance. Impatient to be sacrificed on the altar of vampire defamation, he could tell. It was almost time, too.

The church bells started solemnly counting towards midnight. Trevor gulped down the rest of his cider and regretfully eyed his fish pie, rapidly cooling on the table.

When the sound of the last bell died down, the inn door crashed to the floor, torn off its hinges. Ice-cold air poured into the room along with thin wisps of nighttime fog.

The chatter around the tables died down. A card slipped out of the sleeve of one of Sypha’s tablemates and fluttered to the floor, largely unnoticed.

In long, slow strides, Alucard strolled into the tavern. Each fall of his heavy boots resonated against the wooden boards, and his long coat trailed behind him like a murderer’s shadow. His shirt was torn open at his chest, red splatters drawing the eye to the white of his skin. 

Trevor’s heart rate spiked sharply. 

“So… hungry…” rasped Alucard, staring at his audience with mad, wild eyes, handsomely framed by a generous application of kohl. A dead animal — a black goat, Trevor could see now —  dropped with a dull thud out of Alucard’s grasp.

With a vacant, dreamy expression, Alucard brought a hand to his mouth, and slowly licked the blood off his fingers, staining his lips and chin red.

“Oh for god’s sake,” groaned Trevor under his breath and pulled at the neck of his shirt. A woman’s stifled moan drowned out his curse.

Mercifully, Alucard moved on to circling around the tables like a particularly choosy predator, looking into people’s faces and dismissing them with a glance. That allowed him to breeze by the two large tables that stood between him and Sypha.

Once there, Alucard circled her table twice. Sypha did her best to look petrified under his kohl gaze. Atta girl.

“You,” Alucard whispered into her ear, tender like the night, possessive like a noose around the hangman’s neck. His hands flirted with the line of her neck, not quite touching it, but telegraphing his intent quite clearly.

A shrill cry broke the silent reverie.

“Not her,  _ noooo _ !”

Like a warhorse storming through infantry ranks, a woman pushed her way through the crowd. Knocking Sypha off her seat and nearly into the lap of the swinder to her left, the woman — the tavern girl with strong arms, Trevor recognized — cannon-balled into Alucard’s arms, which  reflexively closed around her for balance.

“Take me instead,” she breathed passionately into Alucard’s stunned face. “I will willingly walk onto the altar of your immortality, my lord.” 

Someone gasped.

Someone started shouting curses mixed with words of encouragement.

Someone dropped a tray. 

Trevor jumped to his feet, but he was five tables too far to rescue Alucard. With an armful of a crazy woman breathing lustfully into his neck and strangling him in a passionate embrace, he made a much more convincing damsel in distress than Sypha ever had.

Sypha, bless her, was much closer, and better at being violent than victimized.

She turned around in her seat and grabbed a plate from the table. “Unhand that woman, you vile monster,” she yelled, catching Alucard by his sleeve and pulling him off-balance. The plate, visibly aimed at the vile monster in question, went off the mark and landed neatly on the tavern maid’s head. The woman’s death grip on Alucard’s neck slackened, and either Sypha whispered something to Alucard, or his senses returned to him along with the oxygen, but he finally unfroze.

Grabbing the maid’s body more comfortably in his arms, Alucard jumped onto the table. The cutlery rattled under their joined weight, but stayed in its place.

“That will be enough,” he declared to the sea of heads all around him. “For tonight.”

Against all laws of physics, Alucard swooshed his cape around himself and his self-appointed victim, crossed the room in three long jumps from one tabletop to another, and disappeared into the night.

With a disappointed moan, another tavern girl fainted into a customer’s arms.

Trevor sat back down into his chair, and reached for his leftover pie.

 

* * *

By the time the commotion died down and Trevor could escape to the vampire mansion through a trail of back alleys and back doors, it was so late in the night it was about to become too early in the morning. 

Yawning, he walked into the library to check up on the villain of the week, but found the room empty. Alucard wasn’t there, nor was he in the dining room or his bedroom. 

He was, it turned out, in the mansion's crypt.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Trevor asked, amused.

In a cleaner shirt, but with black smudges still around his eyes, Alucard was pacing around the room, moving heavy gravestones around like feather pillows and manically examining each one. He was doing a better job of looking genuinely deranged than he had back at the inn.

“Lost something?”

“My mind!” With a groan, Alucard put down the marble statue of a rather ugly cupid kissing a skull, and sat down on the floor. “I’m starting to think you were right. Doesn’t that count as a sure sign of madness?”

“This is shaping up to be a better end to the evening that I expected.” Trevor found himself a spot on the floor as well. “Of course I am right. Now, tell me what about.”

Alucard gave him a hateful, defeated look and made himself more comfortable, stretching his legs and leaning against a king-sized coffin raised on four grotesque gargoyle heads. “Clearly the plan to convince the town their vampire was evil by impersonating him isn’t working, so I thought we should try to find out more about him. Perhaps we could ruin his reputation some other way.”

Delighted, Trevor bent down to peer into Alucard’s face. “Are you telling me you went down looking for his portraits in his  _ crypt _ ?” 

Alucard put his palm against Trevors face and pushed him bodily away. “There was nothing in any other room in the house. And the crypt was clearly inhabited, it’s decorated as much as the dining room.”

Trevor had to agree that for a burial ground, the place looked positively lived in. There were heavy bronze candle holders alongside the walls, an ornate skull here and there, bouquets of bones arranged over velvet covers. Alucard nodded at the gargoyle coffin behind him, and Trevor noticed that the lid was shifted open, so he rose from his seat to peer inside. 

“That looks expensive,” Trevor whistled.

“It is,” Alucard said. “That’s Egyptian silk. Luxury bedding, for those of us who prefer sleeping in fur coats.”

“But still no portrait, helpfully tucked under his coffin pillow? A bedside diary lovingly recording every sordid detail of his life?” Trevor asked, poking at the soft lining of the coffin just in case.

Alucard sighed, shook his head, and rubbed a hand over his tired eyes. The hand came away stained with black smudges, and Alucard sighed again.

“It was a long night,” Trevor agreed. “Speaking of — where did you leave that woman?”

“I left her in the library chair, still unconscious,” Alucard said, plucking at his shirtsleeve melancholically. 

“I was in the library a minute ago. There was no one there.” Trevor’s stomach dropped. “Where is she?”

The words had barely left his mouth and Alucard was already on his feet, all signs of exhaustion gone. In one swift motion, he lifted the lid off the coffin, one-handed, grabbed Trevor by the neck of his shirt, and threw him inside the coffin. Also one-handed.

Before Trevor could catch his breath and spend all of it to yell at Alucard, the vampire jumped into the coffin after him and slammed the lid closed above them both.

All light left the world. There was only the deafening heartbeat in Trevor’s ears, and the heavy weight pressed against his body.

“What do you think you are doing?” Trevor hissed under his breath, trying not to inhale a faceful of Alucard’s hair.

At least he hoped he had hissed. In the close confines of the coffin, with the Egyptian goddamn silk rustling under their weight, it came out as a strangled passionate whisper.

In a feat of vampire contortionism, Alucard’s hand snaked along their bodies, and his palm pressed flat against Trevor’s mouth, sealing it shut. “Be still. Listen.”

Trevor diligently attempted to ignore the entirety of Alucard on top of him — and there was a lot of Alucard, heavy and lean and stretched all the way along Trevor’s body — but between the rustle of soft fabric and the blood hammering in his ears, not to mention a good two inches of stone cutting them off from the world, he wouldn’t have heard an army if it was marching into the house right this minute. He tried moving his mouth against Alucard’s hand to say as much, but Alucard only pressed it — and himself — more firmly against Trevor. 

“Don’t move. No sound.” The words brushed against Trevor’s ear on Alucard’s breath, sending Trevor’s heart racing in excitement. “She’s coming.”

_ She _ couldn’t be the returning master of the house, so it could only be either Sypha or their kidnapping victim. And Sypha, while she could be a pain sometimes, hardly warranted hiding in a coffin.

And the other woman, unless Alucard manhandling him into coffins had damaged his brain, was just a barmaid. Why were they hiding from her? He tried yet again to move against Alucard’s hold. He might as well have tried to shrug off the stone coffin lid.

With a shrug, Trevor relaxed into the hold. If lying back and letting Alucard physically restrain him was the only thing to be done, he could find it in himself to do that.

Alucard’s body above him tensed, imprinting all of his elbows and knees onto Trevor, by which he assumed the tavern maid had just entered the crypt. But he couldn't hear her until she started speaking.

“My lord? Are you here?” Her voice came muffled but discernible through the lid. “Is this your place of rest?” Her words became clearer, which had to mean she had come closer to the coffin.

And then, against all odds, the stone lid — which Trevor wasn’t sure he could have moved himself without a good crowbar — shifted a little, with an unpleasant scraping noise.

Alucard hissed through his teeth and unpeeled his hand from Trevor’s mouth as if he’d bitten him. (Which, for the record, Trevor hadn’t, even though he had briefly entertained the thought.) Almost elbowing him in the nose, Alucard rose a little and repositioned his arms somewhere to their sides. Trevor instinctively moved his head to see what he was doing there, but it was still pitch dark around them.

“Don’t just lie there,” Alucard whispered frenetically, speaking almost into Trevor’s mouth — whatever his maneuvers were about, they’d ended up with Alucard’s face barely a hairbreadth away from his own. It was not the most comfortable position for thinking. “Help me hold the lid on.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and then he was blindly feeling the inside of the lid with his hands, trying to find a good handhold. So far he had only found Alucard’s hipbones and thighs.

“My lord? Did I interrupt your sleep? My clumsy hands!” The woman’s words might have been been apologetic, but her tone was anything but. Trevor felt the coffin shake from another energetic shove she gave to the lid.

Alucard cursed under his breath, and Trevor felt his fingers brush against his own. Alucard tugged at his hand. “There is purchase here.” And indeed, once Alucard placed his hand in the right place, Trevor could feel it too — some sort of groove just above the seam of the coffin lid. He held onto it with unnecessary force, hoping to clear his head.

After another unsuccessful shake of the coffin, the woman sighed. “I was hoping to get a closer look at your face, my lord. And to share your bed of darkness.”

“Bed of darkness?” Trevor mouthed incredulously. Above him, Alucard tensed his grip on the coffin lid. Guess he was out of hands to shut Trevor up with, Trevor thought giddily.

“I’ve always dreamt about that,” she continued, oblivious to her unappreciative audience. “To lie down with you, so that we could ascend together. You, and me, and the eternal night. Eternal life. I’ve dreamt about you since I was a little girl, went to church only to look at Lucifer’s statue and drink in your likeness, and yet your fair face surpasses even holy works of art shaped in your honor.”

Trevor felt helpless tremors of silent laugher build in his chest. He could feel Alucard’s chest rise and fall quickly above him — he was probably having some sort of indignant paroxysm, at the woman or Trevor or both.

“It seems the closest I can be to you this moment is to lie separated by this cold stone,” the woman sighed dreamily. “So be it. If I cannot see you, I shall be within your reach when you arise from your sleep.”

Thump.

Scrape.

Shuffle.

“That makes it three of us,” Trevor mouthed silently. “Do you think she’ll fall asleep on top of this coffin?”

Alucard did not reply. With a defeated sigh, his let his head drop, resting his forehead against Trevor’s. “Why me.” 

There was no fight left in his plea, and Trevor was almost sympathetic.

Almost.

“Might as well catch some sleep,” he said amicably, wrapping an arm around Alucard’s torso to shift them both into a slightly more comfortable position. “Your bed of darkness is not too shabby.”

He didn’t have time to find out if they could have really fallen asleep like that, the last of the Belmonts with an armful of a vampire, cozily tucked in a crypt coffin together. Perhaps sent by his ancestors suddenly getting invested in his virtue, Sypha came to their rescue, again.

The coffin lid elevated, propelled by pillars of ice growing out of the ground at Sypha’s behest.

“Where is that woman?” Alucard asked immediately, raising his head. Trevor had an impression that he wasn’t in a hurry to get out of the coffin unless Sypha reassured him that the barmaid was nowhere in sight.

“Enjoying her beauty sleep, for the next couple of hours at least,” she pointed at the coffin lid, now suspended above their heads. “Enchanted this time — I didn’t want to brain her with a tray again. That spell works marvels for insomnia, by the way, or so my grandfather always told me. You getting out? Unless you wish to stay here, of course.” 

Alucard hurried to unpeel himself from Trevor. 

“She must have caught you by surprise, if you thought to hide so… unconventionally.” Sypha continued. Her face was stoic, which somehow made it worse. Or better, thought Trevor, propping himself on an elbow to watch Alucard school his features into someone haughty and clearly in control of his own life.

But to his surprise, Alucard deflated mid-motion, with his legs still dangling over the coffin’s edge.

“I just don’t understand what’s going on anymore,” he said, slumping down. “I can barely remember the times when we were doing simple things like plotting Dracula’s demise. I’ve never felt less like a vampire than when trying to convince this godforsaken town that I am one!” He looked at Trevor resentfully. “I have a feeling Belmont here would have an easier time impersonating a vampire. I’m sure he’d nail the public menace part of it just fine.”

“Damn right,” Trevor said. “Would be much better at it than you.”

“Maybe you should, too. Maybe you’ll even like women breaking into your house to braid your hair while you sleep.”

“Yeah, maybe you should,” echoed Sypha, thoughtfully drumming her fingers on the coffin. “Maybe we have been going at it the wrong way all this time.”

“Sypha,” started Alucard carefully; his desire to support any plan that didn’t involve him kidnapping enthusiastic tavern maids was clearly at war with the notion of relying on Trevor to do the same. 

But Sypha wasn’t listening.

“Do you know what’s behind every good story ever told? It changes detail every time, growing flourishes here and losing some there. The deserts become forests, a fisherman’s son becomes a woodcutter, a grand vizier becomes a mage — the storyteller tells the version of the story that is the best suited to each audience.” She was talking to them in her Speaker voice, resonant and rhythmic and a little bit magical in a way that had nothing to do with fireballs and ice pillars. “It’s not allowed to be static, written in stone or in ink, precisely so that it can’t be misunderstood. It flows so that the listeners hear the things that speak only to them, and it’s the storyteller’s job to intuit those things as they weave the age-old pattern of the story.” The look she gave them both spoke of frustration with herself for not having seen it sooner. “We have not been trying to intuit these details, we have been trying to rewrite the flow of their story: one about a legendary protector of the city, no matter how dark his style was.”

“We were trying to tell them he was a villain,” Alucard said.

Sypha nodded. “And we don’t need him to be the villain.” She turned to Trevor, with a grin that mirrored his own.

“We need a villain to bring him down,” Trevor said. “And we have just the man for the job.”

 

* * *

“Come out, you filthy traitor!” Trevor roared. A satisfying echo swept through the street, sending the odd servant cowering for shelter. “Face me, coward, or I’ll unearth you from your grave myself!”

Trevor flexed his sword arm. The joints of his heavy gauntlets clicked with every move, spikes bristling in a very gothically hazardous manner. The heavy plated boots were similarly accessorized, and added weight to his every step. In a grim helmet with a visor, wrapped in dark furs strapped to his body with approximately fifty leather harnesses — and one day he would grill Sypha until she confessed just where she’d procured all these items on such short notice — Trevor felt every bit a charcoal-painted villain.

He was loving it.

“Show yourself!” he thundered again, circling the main square of the town. He let the tip of the heavy broadsword in his hand drag against the cobblestones, sending sparks along its trail. “Face your punishment! Dracula is coming, and he will wipe the Earth clean of all vermin — and that includes you, turncoat!” He raised his sword above his head for emphasis, and its blade caught fire — not the reflection of the thinning strip of red on the horizon, but literal blazing fire. 

Sypha knew her shit, bless her.

“He’ll destroy all humans, and he will take extra pleasure in punishing his own kin who defied him!”

He threw a glance at the clocktower — Alucard should be appearing any minute now. Perhaps Sypha was preparing something special for his stage entrance. A wall of ice, perhaps? The onlookers were still around, whispering to each other furiously and gathering in a growing crowd around the town square. Good. The more audience, the better. He was half-expecting some of the glowering people to stand up to him as the trespassing strange ‘vampire’ and defend the honor of their homeboy bloodsucker, but the flaming sword trick must have held them back.

The last flicker of sunset melted into the horizon. A thin mist crept into the square in tendrils so ominous that it could have only been by design.

When Alucard stepped into the square, it was without any pomp or circumstance. No walls of fire or ice announced his appearance, no thunder punctuated his step. He walked unhurried, plainly dressed, arms loose at his side. If not for an oversized thin sword hanging at his hip, he would have looked almost — harmless. Frail. 

“Brother,” he said, in a soft voice. An offering of peace. 

Trevor could sense the audience swooning without having to turn his head.

“I am no brother to the likes of you,” he spat. “Traitor, who tells himself and others that his protection matters anything against Dracula’s power.”

“We do not have submit to Dracula,” Alucard said, head held high — an image of righteous fury, held back only by strength of character. If Trevor wasn’t too busy antagonizing him in public, he would have swooned a little himself. “These people — they deserve protection. They deserve to live.”

Trevor barked out a laugh. “Their chances of survival would have been higher if they had run from your playbox and banded with their neighbours behind stronger walls.” A pause, to let them absorb that. “Of course, that would only have delayed the inevitable. Isn’t it ironic that you have willingly shortened the lifespan of the vermin you pretend to care about?”

“I do care. Which is why I’m asking you to leave.” In his billowing white shirt and the golden halo of his hair, head held high and a hand resting on the pommel of his sword, Alucard cut a very pretty picture of resistance against the Prime Evil.

Trevor grinned and pointed his flaming sword at him. “Or what, you’ll make me? I’d like to see you try.”

Alucard’s head dropped in disappointment and acknowledgement of what was coming next. 

What came next came faster than a human eye could see. Alucard’s sword was unsheathed in his hand, pointing unerringly at Trevor’s neck. 

The crowd gasped.

They clashed, with a ring of metal on metal and a well-timed rumble of thunder. Another one for Sypha. 

Attack. Parry. Sidestep. Block. Attack again, and bloody well make sure the guys in the back can see Trevor overpower Alucard in the most intimidating light possible.

It would have been boring, with anyone else. But Alucard knew a sword wasn’t Trevor’s weapon of choice, and he enjoyed subtly pushing him around without breaking out of character. A vicious cut across the shoulder brace that ended, screeching, at the metal of his gauntlet sleeves. A thin scratch across his thigh that Trevor could feel leave a wet trail down his clothes. 

When another blade lock brought them up close, Alucard whispered, “Nice hat. Hides your face.”

Fucking bastard was a sore loser. Trevor gritted his teeth and swung his sword closer to Alucard’s face, hoping to sear his golden locks a little bit. Beautiful pyrotechnics aside, he sorely missed his whip — Sypha had confiscated it as too likely to give away his identity. In all honesty, he suspected she didn’t want him to injure Alucard in the heat of the moment. 

He was looking forward to winning this fight. He was getting hot in this gear anyway.

After a few more minutes of this performance, Alucard gave him a sign that he was ready for the final showdown. Trevor imbued his sword movements with more energy; the flames on his blade blazed up, casting both of their faces in a dramatic glow, and Alucard slowly started giving way under his push. He stepped back, and stepped back again, until, with a block that rattled his teeth, Trevor got him backed up against some saint’s statue, placed nice and central on the square.

“Got you,” he panted through his helmet. Wordlessly, Alucard looked up at him — his last call to find a peaceful conclusion to this.

Someone in the crowd sobbed. 

“If I submit, will you let the townspeople go?” he asked with quiet dignity. The swirls of mist picked up, and wrapped around them in gentle loops, obscuring their movements until they were two silhouettes cut off from the rest of the world.

The sobbing in the crowd grew into definite crying.

“What’s the point in letting them live? Dracula’s hordes will find them anywhere. You’ll be buying them a few weeks at most.” Trevor held his sword steady, just above Alucard’s heart.

“You can report to your lord that you cleansed the world of the traitor,” Alucard said, dropping his sword to the ground with a clang. “Does it matter to him if a handful of humans get a few more weeks’ worth of respite? Give me what little consolation remains to me.”

This was where you could come at both vampires with pitchforks, thought Trevor glumly. Stupid town with its stupid vampire reflexes all wrong. What could be more natural than stabbing someone in the back when they were too busy gloating over their fallen enemy?

Oh well. It seemed in this town, if he wanted anything done properly, he had to do it himself.

Alucard was standing before him with his eyes turned down, expecting to be stabbed and make his stage exit. He looked noble and tragic, and terribly wronged, and very pretty. 

This show deserved a grand finale, Trevor thought, as the sight before him pushed him towards a little improvisation. 

“Trust me,” he whispered to Alucard, and threw his sword to the ground as well. It clanged and hissed and went out as it landed on the stones.

He could see Alucard tensing, and hear the crowd go silent.

Watch me, Trevor thought, and reached out a hand to cradle Alucard’s jaw. The spiked gauntlet was an ugly contract on the untarnished skin. 

With another hand, Trevor raised his visor. Someone in the background understood what was going to happen a moment before Alucard did, and uttered a cry. Alucard’s pupils blowing wide was the last thing Trevor saw before he angled Alucard’s head to one side and leaned close enough to bury his face in the crook of his bare neck.

With a wide stretch of his jaw, Trevor sunk his teeth in Alucard’s skin.

Alucard gasped and shuddered in his arms, a tremor Trevor felt even through the heavy gauntlet.

A metallic, warm taste burst on Trevor’s tongue. Shocked, he pulled back and raised his fingers to his mouth.

Blood, as red and common as anyone else’s. For some reason, the knowledge was humbling.

He met Alucard’s eyes, wide and indecipherable. A feeling, heavy like guilt, urgent like anxiety, heady like battle fever pulled at Trevor’s tongue, and he searched for the right words.

Fortunately, before he could make a fool of himself, a hissing sound caught his attention. Steam clouds started to rise above them, hiding them from view. Sypha’s arranged exit for Alucard.

“Shit,” muttered Trevor. He’d almost forgotten why they were here in the first place.

Alucard seemingly managed to collect himself in time, because he quickly tore the shirt off his back and let it drop on the stones next to his sword. Without another glance at Trevor, the vampire flickered — and disappeared. 

Slowly, Trevor straightened up. A gust of piercing cold wind swept over the square, revealing the scene to the spectators.

“Behold,” Trevor said heavily, not looking back at the pile left behind by Alucard. “Your protector is dead. And soon, all of you will be too.”

“And who might you be?”

The voice had the same chill in it as the wind that had chased away the mist. It was not any voice Trevor had heard before.

A figure richly clad in what had been the peak of fashion a few royal successions ago stepped into the city square. The man had light hair, pale features arranged in timeless perfection like a marble statue, and an expression of polite confusion.

He was not at all like Alucard, but the recognition of his identity was instant and complete.

“Vampire,” hissed Trevor, and launched himself at the newcomer.

The city’s very own protector, apparently, had no qualms about continuing their conversation as a fight — all the while still wearing that polite expression on his face. And unlike Alucard, he didn’t feel the need to pull any of his punches. He had arrived unarmed, but between one blink and the next, he picked up a giant metal rod that may have been a street sign or a lamppost and started using it like a battle staff to press his advantage.

In these showy clothes, and without his whip, Trevor was barely holding his ground. Worst of all, he was entirely on his own: even if he was anywhere nearby, Alucard had to continue playing dead if their ruse was to serve any purpose at all, and Sypha was still in charge of pyrotechnics, hidden from view. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a wide circle of fire appear around him and the vampire — she must have been trying to push the crowds further back, to avoid casualties from this unplanned fight.

Barely dodging another sweep of the vampire’s improvised weapon, Trevor cursed under his breath. He didn’t have a plan. Alucard’s sword was useless to him — it was the kind of long weapon that only made sense if you could wave off the laws of gravity. Would have been a pretty useful skill to have, in a fight against someone who did exactly the same sort of thing.

Another jab of the metal post Trevor couldn’t avoid or parry landed heavily against his leg. The pain was blinding, despite all the fur padding; he hoped it hadn’t broken any of the really important bones.

He hoped, most of all, that there was any outcome of this fight that didn’t leave him dead. With him yielding more ground with every step just to avoid getting skewered on this blasted rod, the chances looked slimmer than Alucard’s stupid long sword.

When he saw a giant white wolf ran towards them in large, soundless leaps, Trevor thought he had started seeing things. 

When he noticed that the wolf was carefully holding his consecrated whip between its teeth, Trevor became absolutely convinced he was hallucinating. But when the beast threw it in his direction, Trevor jumped to catch the whip anyway. He was not going to look an imaginary wolf in the mouth.

The wolf’s appearance was enough to give the newcomer vampire pause. He wasn’t so obliging as to drop his guard completely, but he did look at the beast with narrowed eyes.

“You,” he murmured, repositioning himself so as to keep both the wolf and Trevor in his line of sight. Trevor was cheered by all the signs pointing to the fact that the wolf was apparently on his side. “Now you, I don’t understand at all. Why go against someone as powerful as your father?”

With a silent snarl that showed off an impressive set of teeth, the wolf leaped at the vampire. Unsurprisingly, the vampire dodged that attack: he was still superhumanly fast.

Unsurprisingly, that still didn’t give him any eyes in the back of his head. 

It took him a few moments to catch up with the fact that as he moved away from the beast, he had stepped into a perfect position to be stabbed in the back by Alucard’s long sword, which could float at its wielder’s command.

When he was nearby.

The wolf landed silently on his paws and trotted to where the vampire stood still, like a human-shaped and rather incredulous swordstone. The vampire moved to pull the sword out of his chest, but Trevor’s whip coiled around him, pinning his arms to his sides. Decay was already spreading from the wound, like an ashen starburst growing across his body: Alucard’s weapon, too, was effective against monsters.

“Good boy,” Trevor said whole-heartedly, and reached down to pat the wolf on the head. Alucard snapped his teeth at him, but let Trevor lean on him a little, taking the weight off his injured leg. 

He couldn’t rest just yet. It didn’t look like Alucard was in any shape for talking, on account of being a giant wolf and all, and the rot was spreading very fast — in a few moments, the fallen vampire would not be able to answer any questions.

‘How are you more annoying that Alucard’ wasn’t the most important question to pose to him, so Trevor settled for the next best one. “How did you know who we are and where to look for us?” There was no chance that this was a coincidence, not after he’d recognized Alucard on sight. 

The vampire’s voice was rusty, his vocal cords already touched by decay. “What do you think? You were in my house, talking like idiots right in front of enchanted mirrors. You could not have gotten my attention faster if you’d sent the message with a royal courier.”

Trevor had to give the vampire some points: even well on his way to the grave, he still clung to his unruffled poise. Too bad for him it was not his day to be the hero. Or even the villain.

“It took me a few days to get here from Dracula’s castle,” the vampire continued, his voice now barely a sandy whisper. “I had to obey his summons, but I wasn’t going to do it at the expense of giving my home to an impostor and a traitor.”

The news that Dracula was gathering vampires to his castle chilled the blood in Trevor’s veins. Their quest was never going to be an easy task, but with an army of vampires at his side, and inside a travelling castle, Dracula seemed even further beyond their reach.

Except. 

Trevor turned his head to the wolf. “I know less about your dad’s house than you do, obviously, but if the enchanted mirrors this guy’s talking about are anything like what I read about in my family records, they work both ways.” 

The wolf stared at him in what Trevor supposed was assent. And, after the moment went on for a little too long, a reminder to finish the job at hand, Trevor realized.

He gripped the sword by the handle and with his full weight behind the action, cut the vampire’s body in two. With a rasp like autumn leaves, the body disintegrated into a pile of ash. Two piles of ash, to be accurate.

His arm still resting on the wolf’s neck, Trevor turned to the remaining crowd. 

“Your protector has been defeated,” Trevor addressed the people who didn’t know better than to run for their lives when they saw vampires. “Honoring his last request, I will not kill you myself. Dracula’s hordes can do it just fine. Run, if you will. Stay, if you want. You will die anyway.”

Not one person responded, but he hadn’t expected them to. Hopefully Sypha, who had managed not to blow her cover through all this fighting, would drop a few words into the most responsive ears. The rest was not their job, not when they had a chance to locate Dracula’s castle and get to it before it moved again.

With a limp, Trevor slowly started walking back to the vampire’s mansion. He only stopped when the wolf Alucard pulled at his sleeve. The floating sword hovered near his free hand.

“Oh, right,” said Trevor, and grasped the hilt of Alucard’s sword. Tired as he was, he wouldn’t be able to tell if he was carrying the weapon or the weapon was pulling him along the way. “Suppose you still need this one, right.”

Suppose they all did.

  
  



End file.
